Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster

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was in the way of getting inside information, about a small opera thathad a sensational part for a baritone, she'd work it and make her husbandtoo, and since he's one of the real backers and a friend of Mr.Eckstein's, they'd be likely to accomplish something."

He got a little overflow from the fulness of her heart at that that wouldhave rewarded him amply for a more arduous and less amusing prospect thanhe was committed to. It was always touch and go whether this summerplunge into musical criticism wouldn't bore him frightfully. Pretentioussolemnities of any kind were hard for him to tolerate and an opera seasonis, of course, stuffed with these, even a democratized blue-penciledout-of-doors affair like this. It was a great relief to find him a mindas free from sentimental resonances as Mary Wollaston's swimming about init. They saw eye to eye over a lot of things.

They were in whole-hearted agreement for example about a certainimpresario, Maxfield Ware, who created a sensation among the company andstaff by turning up ostentatiously unaccounted for from New York andlooking intensely enigmatical whenever any one asked him any questions.He was a sufficiently well-known figure in that world for surmises tospring up like round-eyed dandelions wherever he trod.

It wasn't long before everybody knew, despite the concealments which hisponderous diplomacy never cast aside, that his objective was Paula. Shedivined this before he had made a single overt move in her direction andpointed it out to Mary with a genuine pleasure sounding through the toneof careless amusement she chose to adopt.

"You wouldn't have anything to do with a person like that, would you?"Mary was startled into exclaiming. "Of course, if he were genuinely whathe pretends to be and the things he boasts were true...."

"Oh, he's genuine enough," said Paula. "A quarter to a half as good as hepretends and that's as well as the whole of that lot will average. Thoughhe isn't the sort you and John would take to, for a fact."

It was not the first time Mary had found herself bracketed with herfather in just this way. It wasn't a sneering way, hardly hostile. ButMary by the second or third repetition began reading an importantsignificance into it. Paula in her instinctive fashion was beginning toweigh alternatives, one life against the other, a thing it wasn't likelyshe had ever attempted before.

There was a tension between John and Paula which Mary saw mounting dailyover the question of his next visit to Ravinia. Paula wanted him, wasgetting restless, moody, as nearly as it was possible for her to beill-natured over his abstention. Yet it was evident enough that she hadnot invited him to come; furthermore, that she meant not to invite him.Once Mary would have put this down to mere coquetry but this explanationfailed now to satisfy altogether. There was something that lay deeperthan that. Some sort of strain between them dating back, she surmised, tothe talk her father had referred to down in North Carolina in the jocularassertion that he had told Paula she would have to begin now supportingthe family. Had the same topic come up again during his visit to Ravinia?

The perception of this strain in their relation increased Mary'sreluctance to bring the topic up herself, in default of a lead fromPaula, out of nowhere. It almost seemed as if Paula consciously avoidedgiving her such a lead, sheered away whenever she found they were"getting warm" in that direction.

There were hours when the undertaking she had committed herself to withWallace Hood seemed fantastic. Between two persons like her father andPaula a meddler could make such an incalculable amount of mischief. Allthe current maxims of conduct would support her in a refusal tointerfere. It was exclusively their affair, wasn't it? Why not let themsettle it in their own way?

Yet there were other hours when she put her procrastinations down tosheer cowardice. This occurred whenever she got a letter from her aunt atHickory Hill.

Miss Wollaston was a dutiful but exceedingly cautious correspondent, butbeneath the surface of her brisk little bulletins were many significantimplications. Rush had made two or three trips to town for consultationswith Martin Whitney ... Doctor Steinmetz, presence unaccounted for, hadbeen a guest one day at lunch... Graham's father had come out oneSaturday and after he had been exhaustively shown over the place the menhad talked until all hours.... The building program was to be curtailedfor the present; to be resumed, perhaps when prices weren't so high norlabor so hard to get.... The new Holstein calves had come. Mary had beentold, hadn't she, of the decision to constitute the herd in this mannerinstead of buying all milking cows.... Sylvia, declaring that Rush andGraham had got too solemn to live with, had finally obeyed her motherand gone home to the Stannards' summer place at Lake Geneva.

Mary read these letters to Paula as they came in the hope of provokingsome question that would make it possible to tell John Wollaston's wifethe tale of his necessities, but nothing of the sort happened. Paula didobserve (a little uneasily?) apropos of Steinmetz' visit:

"John says he's taken quite a fancy to him. He told me he was going toget him to come out if he could."

The other casts brought up nothing whatever.

As it happened Mary paid dear for her procrastination. Paula sent herinto town one day with a long list of errands, a transparently factitiouslist, which, taken in connection with an unusual interest she displayedin the item of lunch, made it more than sufficiently plain to Mary thatfor the day she wasn't wanted at Ravinia.

She concealed, successfully she thought, the shock she felt at these newtactics of Paula's, studied the list and said she thought she should beable to return on the three o'clock train. She made a point however ofnot coming back until the four-fifteen. It was nearly six before she gotback to the cottage, but the contented lazy tone in which Paula fromup-stairs answered her hail, made it plain that her tardiness had notbeen remarked. However Paula had spent her day, the upshot of it wassatisfactory.

"Shall I come up?" Mary asked.

"Come along," Paula answered. "I'm not asleep or anything and besides Iwant to talk to you."

"I think I got everything you want," Mary said from Paula's doorway, "orif not exactly, what will do just about as well."

Paula, stretched out on the bed rather more than half undressed, with thecontented languor of a well fed lioness yet with some passion or othersmoldering in her eyes, made no pretense at being interested in Mary'ssuccess in executing her commissions.

"I had Max to lunch to-day," she said. "I knew you hated him and then itwas complicated enough anyway. I suppose it might have been better if I'dtold you so right out instead of making up all those things for you to doin town, but I couldn't quite find the words to put it in somehow and Ihad to have it out with him. He's been nagging at me for a week and he'sgoing away to-morrow. He's given me until then to think it over."

There was no use trying to hurry Paula. Mary took off her hat, lighted acigarette and settled herself in the room's only comfortable chair beforeshe asked, "Think what over?"

"Oh, the whole thing," said Paula. "What he's been harping on for thelast week.--He _is_ a loathsome sort of beast," she conceded after alittle pause. "But he's right about this. Absolutely."

Was her father ever fretted, Mary wondered, by this sort of thing? Didhis nerves draw tight, and his muscles, too, waiting for the idea behindthese perambulations to emerge?

"I can imagine a lot of things that Mr. Maxfield Ware would be rightabout," she observed. "Which one is this?"

"About me," said Paula. "About what I'd have to do if I wanted to getanywhere. He thinks I've a good chance to get into the very first class,along with Garden and Farrar and so on. And unless I can do that, there'sno good going on. I'd never be happy as a second rater. Well, that'strue. And my only chance of getting to the top, he says, is in beingmanaged just right. I guess that's true, too. He says that if I take thisMetropolitan contract that LaChaise has been talking about, go down toNew York as one of their 'promising young American sopranos' to sing onoff-nights and fill in and make myself generally useful, I simply won'thave a chance. They wouldn't get excited about me whatever happened.They'd go on patronizing me and yawning in my face no matter how good Iwas. I'd do just as well, he says, so far as my career is concerned, tostay right here in Chicago and get Campanini to give me two or threeappearances a season;--make a sort of amateur night of it for the goldcoast to buzz about. I'd have a lot easier time that way and it wouldcome to the same thing in the end. And he says that unless I want to goin for his scheme, that's what I'd better do. Well, and he's right. I cansee that, plainly enough."

Mary refrained from asking what Max's scheme was. She'd learn, no doubt,in her stepmother's own good time. She nodded a tentative assent to Max'sgeneral premises and waited.

"He certainly was frank enough," Paula went on after a while. "He wantsto make a real killing he says. Something he's never quite brought offbefore. He says the reason he's always failed before is that he's had togo and mix a love-affair up with it somehow. He's either fallen in lovewith the woman or she with him or if it was a man he was managing, theyboth went mad over the same woman. Something always happened anyhow tomake a mess of it. But he says he isn't interested in me in the least inthat way and that he can see plainly enough that I'm not in him. Butimagine five years with him!"

She broke off with a shudder, not a real shudder though. The sort onemakes over a purely imaginary prospect. Some expression of her feelingmust have betrayed itself in Mary's face, for Paula, happening to look ather just then, sat up abruptly.

"Oh, I know," she said. "It's all very well, but that's the sort ofperson you have to go in with and that's the sort of scheme you have togo into if you're going to get anywhere. Something of the sort anyhow,--Inever heard of one exactly like this. But this is what he proposes: we'reeach to put up twenty thousand dollars. That's easy enough as far as I'mconcerned because what I put up isn't to be spent at all. It's just to beturned over to somebody--some banker like Martin Whitney--as a guaranteethat I won't break my contract. He says he wouldn't take on anybody in myposition without a guarantee like that. He's to spend the money he putsup for publicity and other things but he's to get paid back out of what Iearn. He's to be my manager absolutely. I'm to go wherever he says; carryout any contracts he makes for me. He's to pay my expenses and guaranteeme ten thousand a year beyond that. If he doesn't pay me that much, thenit's he that breaks the contract. And of course, he can't make me doanything that would ruin my voice or my health. He says he's going towork me like a dog. That's what he thinks I need. He says he can get mein with the Chicago company for their road tour before their regularseason opens here. He won't let me sing either in Chicago or New Yorkuntil I've landed, but he wants me to go to New York this winter andcoach with Scotti, if we can get him. Then go to Mexico City in thespring and then down to Buenos Aires for their winter season there.That's July and August, of course, when it's summer up here. By that timehe thinks we'll be ready for Europe; London or Paris. He's rather infavor of London. He knows all the ropes and he'll buy the people thathave to be bought and square the people that have to be squared and workthe publicity. He says he's the best publicity man in the world and Iguess he knows. Then after a year or two over there, he thinks we'll beready to come back to the Metropolitan and clean up."

"And what," asked Mary, "is his share of the clean-up to be?"

"Oh, a half," said Paula; "we'd be equal partners. That's fair enough, Isuppose. I sat there all through lunch while he was talking, hating him;hating his big blue chin, and his necktie and his great shinyfinger-nails and the way he ate, and feeling, of course, perfectlyfrightfully unhappy. I told him I'd let him know what I would do sometimebefore to-morrow noon, and as soon as I could I got rid of him. And thenI came up here and cried and cried. And that's something I haven't donefor a long while. I felt as if he was a big spider that had been runningabout all over me tying me up in his web. And as if I was a fly andcouldn't get out. There is something spidery about him, you know. The wayhe goes back and forth and the way he's so patient and indirect about itall. It seemed like the end of the world to me before he finished, as ifI never was going to see John again. Oh, I cried my eyes out. Well, andthen about an hour ago I came to. I realized that I hadn't signed hishorrible contract and that I needn't. And that when this beastly seasonwas over,--and it isn't going to last much longer, thank goodness,--Icould go home to John and lock up the piano and never look at a scoreagain. It was like coming out of a nightmare."

Mary dared not stop to think. She took the plunge.

"There's something about father you've got to be told. I promised WallaceHood weeks ago that I'd tell you. I guess he and Martin Whitney think youknow about it by now."

"Something I've got to be told about John?" Paula echoed incredulously."Why, I was talking with him over the telephone not ten minutes beforeyou came in."

"Oh, I know. It's nothing like that," Mary said. "But they say he hastuberculosis. Not desperately, not so that he can't get well if he takescare of it. If he lives out-of-doors and doesn't worry or try to work.But if he takes up his practise again this fall, they say,--DoctorSteinmetz says,--that it will be--committing suicide. That's one thing.And the other is that he's practically bankrupt. Anyhow, that for a yearor two, until he can get back into practise, he'll need help. That's whyWallace and Mr. Whitney wanted you told about it."

There hadn't been a movement nor a sound from Paula. Mary, at the end ofthat speech was breathless and rather frightened.

Paula stood over her staring. "Oh," she exclaimed, and, a moment latershe repeated the ejaculation in a drier tone and with a downwardinflection. She added presently, "I'm not clever the way you are attaking hints. That's the thing it will be just as well for you both toremember." She began bruskly putting on her dressing-gown. "I'm goingdown-stairs to telephone to Max," she explained. "He's got the paper alldrawn up, not the final contract but an agreement to sign one of the sortI told you about. I'm going to tell him that if he will bring it backwith him now, I'll sign it."

Mary stood between her and the door. "Don't you think it would be--fairerto wait?" she asked; "before you signed a thing like that. Until atleast, you were no longer angry with me for having told you too much orwith father because he had told you too little."

Paula pulled up at that and stood looking at her stepdaughter with athoughtful expression that was almost a smile. "I am angry," sheadmitted, "or I was, and just exactly about that. It's queer the way youWollastons, you and your father, anyhow, are always--getting through tothings like that. What you say is fair enough. I guess you're alwaysfair. Can't help being, somehow. But I can't put off telephoning to Max.You see I called up John at Hickory Hill an hour ago. I told him I hadmade up my mind to stop singing. I told him I didn't want any career.That I just wanted to--belong to him. And I asked him to come to me asfast as he could. He's on the way now. So it's important, you see, thatMax should get here first."

CHAPTER XX

TWO WOMEN AND JOHN

Paula seemed calm enough after that one explosion but she moved alongtoward the accomplishment of her purpose, to get herself thoroughlycommitted to Max before John's arrival, with the momentum of a linerleaving its pier. Mary made two or three more attempts at dissuasion buttheir manifest futility kept her from getting any real power into them.She was, to tell the truth, in a panic over the prospect of thatevening;--her father arriving triumphant in Paula's supposed surrender tofind Maxfield Ware with his five years' contract in his pocket. And theresponsibility for the disaster would be attributed to herself; wasindeed so attributable with a kind of theatrical completeness seldom, tobe found in life. It didn't often happen that any one was as entirely toblame for a calamity to some one else as Mary was for this _volte-face_of Paula's.

She did not run away altogether. Paula, indeed, didn't know that she hadfled at all, for Maxfield Ware's tardiness about coming back the secondtime supplied her with a pretext.

It was nearly eight o'clock before he came and Paula, who was momentarilyexpecting John's arrival by then, was in an agony of impatience to signhis papers and get him out of the house again. Ware may have divined herwish and loitered out of mischievous curiosity as to the cause of it. Orhe may, merely, have been prolonging an experience which he foundagreeable. Anyhow, he wouldn't be hurried and he wouldn't go. But Paulafinally turned a look of despairing appeal upon Mary who thereuponannounced her intention of going to to-night's performance in the park.She would drive, of course, and would be glad to take Mr. Ware along.Or, for that matter, she would set him down first wherever he might wantto go. He smiled upon her with the fatuous smile of one who finds he hasmade an unexpected conquest and said he would be delighted to accompanyMiss Wollaston anywhere.

She took him, driving pretty fast, to the Moraine Hotel and was glad thedistance was not greater, for after various heavy-handed and unquenchablepreliminaries he kissed her as nearly on the mouth as possible, clingingto a half-lit cigar the while, just before she whipped around into thehotel drive. She avoided a collision with one of the stone posts narrowlyenough to startle him into releasing her,--he hadn't realized the turnwas so close--and stopped at the lighted carriage door with a jerk thatleft him no option but to get out at once.

She nodded a curt good night and drove back to the park; went to one ofthe dressing-rooms and washed her face. Then she came around in front tohear Edith Mason sing _Romeo and Juliet_. She didn't get just the effectshe anticipated from this lovely performance because Polacco, who is MissMason's husband, came and sat down beside her--there was nothing spideryabout him, thank goodness--and in a running and vivacious commentaryexpressed his lively contempt for this opera of Gounod's. At its best itwas bad _Faust_. Its least intolerable melodies were quotations from_Faust_,--an assertion which he proved from time to time by singing, andnot very softly either, the original themes to the wrath of all who satwithin a twenty-five foot radius of them.

Mary felt grateful to him for giving her something that was notmaddening to think about and after the performance went with him and hiswife to supper so that it was well after midnight before she returned tothe cottage.

It was an ineffable relief to find it dark. Her habit on warm nights wasto sleep on the gloucester swing in the screened veranda and she made ither bed to-night, though beyond a short uneasy doze of two, she didn'tsleep at all.

At half past eight or so, just after she had sat down to breakfast,she heard her father coming down the stairs. She tried to call to himbut could command no voice and so waited, frozen, until he appeared inthe doorway.

"I thought I heard you stirring down here and that it perhaps meantbreakfast. Paula won't be down, I suppose, for hours. She fell asleepabout four o'clock and has been sleeping quietly ever since."

This was exactly like Paula, of course. She was the vortex of thewhole tempest, but when she had thoroughly exhausted the emotionalpossibilities of it she sank into peaceful slumber like a baby aftera hard cry.

No wonder she was too much for these two Wollastons who sat now with drythroats and tremulous hands over the mockery of breakfast! Mary, althoughshe knew, asked her father whether he wanted his coffee clear or withcream in it and having thus broken the spell, went on with a gasp:

"I'm glad Paula isn't coming down. It gives you a better chance to tellme just how you feel about my having interfered. I did run away lastnight. You guessed that, I suppose. But it wasn't to evade it altogether.My--whipping, you know."

It had an odd effect on both of them, this reference to her childhood;her hand moved round the table rim and covered his which rested on theedge of it.

"Did your mother ever punish you?" he asked. "Corporeally? It's myrecollection that she did not. I was always the executioner. I doubt nowif that was quite fair."

"Perhaps not," she asserted dubiously. "In general it isn't fair ofcourse. It probably wasn't in the case of Rush. But with me,--I don'tthink I could have borne it to have mother beat me. It would have seemedan insufferable affront. I'd have hated her for it. But there was a sortof satisfaction in having you do it."

After another moment of silence she smiled and added, "I suppose aFreudian would carry off an admission like that to his cave and gnaw overit for hours."

He stared at her, shocked, incredulous. "What do you know about Freud?"he demanded.

"One couldn't live for two years within a hundred yards of WashingtonSquare without knowing at least as much about it as that," she toldhim,--and was glad of the entrance of the maid with another installmentofthe breakfast. There was no more talk between them during the meal. Butat the end of it she faced him resolutely.

"We must have this out, dad. And isn't now as good a time as any?"

He followed her out into the veranda but the sounds from the dining-room,where the maid had come in to clear away the breakfast, disturbed him soMary suggested a walk.

"Get your hat and we'll go over to the lake. I know a nice place not far,an open field right at the edge of the bluff with one big tree to make itshady. At this hour of the morning we are sure to have it all toourselves."

He said as they walked along, "I've no reproaches for you. Not thismorning. I've thought over a lot of ground since four o'clock."

He said nothing more to the point until they reached the spot which Maryhad selected as their destination--it lived up handsomely to all herpromises--and settled themselves under the shade of the big tree.

"I suppose," he added then, "that I ought to forgive Whitney and Hood.Their intentions were the best and kindest, of course. But I find thatharder to do."

He sat back against the trunk of the tree, facing out over the lake;she disposed herself cross-legged on the grass near by just withinreaching distance. She offered him her cigarette case but he declined.Of late years, since his marriage to Paula, he had smoked very little.As a substitute, now, he picked up a forked bit of branch, and beganwhittling it.

"I'm as much to blame as they are," she said, presently. "More, really.Because, if I hadn't procrastinated-o-ut of cowardice, mostly,--untilyesterday, when she was half-way over the edge, it might never have cometo Maxfield Ware at all. After the situation had dramatized itself likethat, there was only one thing she could do. Of course, they didn'tforesee that five years' contract, any more than I did."

He nodded assent, though rather absently to this. "I'm not muchinterested in the abstract ethics of it," he said. "It's disputable, ofcourse, how far any one can be justified in making a major interferencein another's life; one that deprives him of the power of choice. That'swhat you have done to me--the three of you. If the premises are right,and the outcome prosperous, there's something to be said for it. But inthis case ..."

"Why, it's reasonable to suppose that Whitney understands my financialcondition better than I do. I mean that. It's not a sneer. But what heand Hood don't allow for is that I've never tried to make money.They've no idea what my earning power would be if I were to turn to andmake that a prime consideration. A year of it would take me out of thewoods, I think."

She waited, breathless, for him to deal with the third name. She waspretty well at one with Paula in the relative valuation she put upon herfather's opinion and that of the throat and lung specialist.

"Oh, as for Steinmetz," John Wollaston said, after a pause, querulously,"he's a good observer. There's nothing to be said against him as alaboratory man. But he has the vice of all German scientists; he doesn'tunderstand imponderables. Never a flash of intuition about him. Hemanaged to intimidate Darby into agreeing with him. Neither of them takesmy recuperative powers into account."

He seemed to feel that this wasn't a very strong line to take and thenext moment he conceded as much.

"But suppose they were right," he flashed round at her. "Am I not stillentitled to my choice? I've lived the greater part of my life. I'vepulled my weight in the boat. It should be for me to choose whether Ispend the life I have left in two years or in twenty. If they want tocall that suicide, let them. I've no religion that's real enough to makea valid argument against my right to extinguish myself if I choose."

She wasn't shocked. It was characteristic of their talks together, thisfree range among ethical abstractions, especially on his part.

"You act on the other theory though," she pointed out to him. "Think ofthe people you've patched together just so that they can live at mostanother wretched year or two."

"That's a different thing," he said. "Or rather it comes to the samething. The question of shortening one's life is one that nobody has aright to decide except for himself."

Then he asked abruptly. "What sort of person is Maxfield Ware?"

She attempted no palliations here.

"He kissed me last night," she said, "taking his cigar out of his mouthfor the purpose. He's not a sort of person I can endure or manage. Paulahates him as much as I do, but she can manage him. He'd never try tokiss her like that."

"Oh, God!" cried John. "It's intolerable." He flung away his stick, gotto his feet and walked to the edge of the bluff. "Think of her working,traveling,--living almost,--with a man like that! You say she can managehim; that she can prevent him from trying to make love to her. Well, whatdoes that mean, if you're right, but that she--understands him; his talk;his ideas; his point of view. You can't make yourself intelligible to aman like that; she can. It's defilement to meet his mind anywhere--anyangle of it. She's given him carte blanche, she says, to manage thepublicity for her. Do you realize what that means? He's licensed to tryto make the public believe anything that he thinks would heighten theirinterest in her. That she dresses indecently; that she's a frivolousextravagant fool; that she has lovers. You know how that game is played."

Mary did know. She ran over a list of the great names and opposite everyone of them there sprang into her mind the particular bit of vulgarreclame that had been in its day some press agent's masterpiece. She wasable further to see that Paula would regard the moves of this game with alarge-minded tolerance which would be incomprehensible to John. Afterall, that was the way to take it. If you were a real luminary, not just ablank white surface, all the mud that Mr. Maxfield Ware could splashwouldn't matter. You burnt it off. None of those great names was soiled.

She tried to say something like this to her father, but didn't feel surethat she quite had his attention. He did quiet down again however andresumed his seat at the foot of the tree. Presently he said:

"She's doing it for me. Because my incompetence has forced it upon her.She'd have taken the other thing; had really chosen it." Then without apause, but with a new intensity he shot in a question. "That's true,isn't it? She meant what she said over the telephone?" As Mary hesitatedover her answer he added rather grimly, "You can be quite candid aboutit. I don't know which answer I want."

"She meant every word she said over the telephone," Mary assured him."You couldn't doubt that if you had seen her as I did afterward."

She didn't pretend though that this was the complete answer. Thereflective tone in which she spoke made it clear that there was more toit than that.

"Go on," John said, "tell me the rest of it. I think, perhaps, youunderstand her better than I do."

Mary took her time about going on and she began a little doubtfully. "Ialways begin by being unjust to Paula," she said. "That's my instinct, Isuppose, reproaching her for not doing what she would do if she werelike me. But afterward when I think her out, I believe I understand herpretty well."

"Paula exaggerates," she went on after another reflective pause. "Shemust see things large in order to move among them in a large way. Hergestures, those of her mind I mean, are--sweeping. If she weren't sogood-natured, our--hair-splitting ways would annoy her. Then it'snecessary for her to feel that she's--conquering something."

That last word was barely audible and the quality of the silence whichfollowed it drew John Wollaston's gaze which had been straying over thelake, around to the speaker. She had been occupying her hands while shetalked, collecting tiny twigs and acorn cups that happened to be withinreach but now she was tensely still and paler than her wont, he thought.

"You needn't be afraid to say what's in your mind," he assured her.

"It wasn't that," she told him. "I realized that I had been quotingsomebody else. Anthony March said once of Paula that if she had not beenan artist she might have been a _dompteuse_."

John settled himself more comfortably against his tree trunk. A contactlike this with his daughter's mind must have been inexpressiblycomforting to him after a night like the one he had just spent. Itsrectitude; its sensitiveness; the mere feel and texture of it, put hisjangling nerves in tune.

"Is Ware the wild beast she has an inclination to tame in thisinstance?" he asked.

"He's nothing but a symbol of it," Mary said. Then she managed to get thething a little clearer. "What she'd have done if she'd been like us andwhat we'd have had her do--Mr. Whitney and Wallace and I,--would havebeen to make a sort of compromise between her position as your wife and acareer as Paula Carresford. We'd have had her sign a contract to sing afew times this winter with the Metropolitan or the Chicago company, go ona concert tour perhaps for a few weeks, even give singing lessons or singin a church choir. That would probably have been Mr. Whitney's idea.Rather more than enough to pay her way and at the same time leave as muchof her to you as possible.

"But that's the last thing in the world it would be possible for Paula todo. She must see a great career on one side,--see herself as GeraldineFarrar's successor,--and on the other side she must see a perfectunflawed life with you. So that whichever she chooses she will have asense of making the greatest possible sacrifice. She couldn't have saidto you what she did over the telephone if Mr. Ware hadn't convinced herthat a great career was open to her and she couldn't have signed hiscontract if it had not involved sacrificing you."

She propped herself back against her hands with a sigh of fatigue."There's some of the hair-splitting Paula talks about," she observed.

"It may be fine spun," her father said thoughtfully, "but it seems to meto hold together. Isn't there any more of it?"

"Well, it was balanced like that, you see," Mary went on; "set for theclimax, like the springs in a French play, when I came along at just themoment and with just the word, to topple it over. Being Paula, shecouldn't help doing exactly what she did. So, however it comes out, Ishall be the one person she won't be able to forgive."

She knew from the startled look he turned upon her that this last shothad come uncannily close. She fancied she must almost literally haveechoed Paula's words. If she needed any further confirmation she wouldhave found it in the rather panicky way in which he set about trying toconvince her that she was mistaken, if not in the fact at least in thepermanence of it.

She insisted no further, made indeed no further attempt at all to carrythe theme along and though she listened and made appropriate replies whenthey were called for, she let her wordless thought drift away to a dreamthat it was Anthony March who shared this shade and sunshine with her andthat veiled blue horizon yonder. It was easier to do since her father haddrifted into a reverie of his own. They need not have lingered for theyhad sufficiently talked away all possible grounds of misunderstanding,even if they had not reconciled their disagreement.

It occurred to her to suggest that they go back, but she dismissed theimpulse with no more than a glancing thought. It was his burden, nothers, that remained to be shouldered at the cottage and it might be leftto him to choose his own time for taking it up. Paula seldom came downmuch before noon anyhow.

As for John Wollaston, he was very tired. Paula's volcanic moments alwaysexhausted him. He never could derationalize his emotions, cut himselffree; and while he felt just as intensely as she did, he had to carry thewhole superstructure of himself along on those tempestuous voyages. Inthe mood Paula had left him in this morning, there was nothing in theworld that could have satisfied and restored him as did his daughter'scompanionship. The peace of this wordless prolongation of their talktogether was something he lacked, for a long while, the will to break.

It was not far short of noon when they came back into the verandatogether. He had walked the last hundred yards, after a look at hiswatch, pretty fast and after a glance into both the down-stairs rooms, hecalled up-stairs to his wife in a voice that had an edge of suddenanxiety in it. Then getting no response, he went up, two at a time.

Mary dropped down, limp with a sudden premonition, upon the gloucesterswing in the veranda. The maid of all work, who had heard his call, camefrom the kitchen just as he was returning down the stairs. Mrs. Wollastonhad gone away, she said. Pete had reported with the big car at eleveno'clock and Paula, who apparently had been waiting for him, had drivenoff at once having left word that she would not be back for lunch.

"All right," John said curtly. "You may go."

He was so white when he rejoined Mary in the veranda that she sprang upwith an involuntary cry and would have had him lie down, where she hadbeen sitting. But the fine steely ring in his voice stopped her short.

"Have you any idea," he asked, "where she has gone or what she has goneto do? She came down," he went on without waiting for her answer,--"andlooked for me. Waited for me. And thanks to that--walk we took, I wasn'there. Well, can you guess what she's done?"

"It's only a guess," Mary said, "but she may have gone to seeMartin Whitney."

"Martin Whitney?" he echoed blankly. "What for? What does she want ofhim?"

He broke in upon her again with a mere blank frantic echo of her wordsand once more Mary steadied herself to explain.

"Her agreement with Mr. Ware required her to put up twenty thousanddollars in some banker's hands as a guarantee that she would not breakthe contract. She mentioned Martin Whitney as the natural person tohold it. So I guessed that she might have gone to consult him aboutit;--or even to ask him to lend it to her. As she said, it wouldn'thave to be spent."

"That's the essence of the contract then. It's nothing without that.Until she gets the money and puts it up. Yet you told me nothing of ituntil this moment. If you had done so--instead of inviting me to go for awalk--and giving her a chance to get away..."

He couldn't be allowed to go on. "Do you mean that you think I didthat--for the purpose?" she asked steadily.

He walked abruptly into the house and a moment later she heard him at thetelephone. She stayed where she was, unable to think; stunned rather thanhurt over the way he had sprung upon her.

He seemed a little quieter when he came out a few minutes later."Whitney left half an hour ago for Lake Geneva," he said. "So she'smissed him if that's where she went. There's nothing to do but wait."

He was very nervous however. Whenever the telephone rang, as it did ofcourse pretty often, he answered it himself, and each time hisdisappointment that it was not Paula asking for him, broke down more orless the calm he tried to impose upon himself. He essayed what amendsgood manners enabled him to make to Mary for his outrageous attack uponher. It went no deeper than that. The discovery that Paula was gone andsimultaneously that he need not have lost her obliterated--or ratherreversed--the morning's mood completely.

It was after lunch that he said, dryly, "I upset your life for you, halfa dozen years ago. Unfairly. Inexcusably. I've always been ashamed of it.But it lends a sort of poetic justice to this."

She made no immediate reply, but not long afterward she asked if shemight not go away without waiting for Paula's return. "It would be toodifficult, don't you think?--for the three of us, in a small houselike this."

He agreed with manifest relief. He asked if it was not too late to drivethat afternoon to Hickory Hill, but she said she'd prefer to go by trainanyhow. That was possible she thought.

He did not ask, in so many words, if this was where she meant to go.There was no other place for her that he could think of.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SUBSTITUTE

It was a good guess of Mary's that Paula had gone to borrow the twentythousand dollars but it was to Wallace Hood, not to Martin Whitney, thatshe went for it; and thereby illustrated once more how much moreeffective instinct is than intelligence.

Martin, rich and generous as he was, originator as he was of the edictthat Paula must go to work, would never have been stampeded as Wallacewas in a talk that lasted less than half an hour, into producingsecurities to the amount that Paula needed and offering them up in escrowfor the life of Maxfield Ware's contract.

Wallace was only moderately well off and he was by nature, cautious. Hisinvestments were always of the most conservative sort. This from habitas well as nature because his job--the only one he had ever had--wasthat of estate agent. But Paula's instinct told her that he wouldn'tfind it possible to refuse. I think it told her too, though this was avoice that did not make itself fairly heard to her conscious ear, thathe would be made very fluttered and unhappy by it whether he granted herrequest or not.

What he would hate, she perceived, was the suddenness of the demand andthe irrevocable committal to those five years; the blow it was to thosedomesticities and proprieties he loved so much. The fact that he would bemade sponsor for those unchartered excursions to Mexico, to SouthAmerica, and so on, under the direction of a libidinous lookingcosmopolite like Maxfield Ware.

Why she wanted to put Wallace into the flutters she couldn't have told.She was, as I say, not quite aware that she did. But he had been runningup a score in very minute items that was all of five years old. The factthat all these items went by the name of services, helpful little acts ofkindness, made the irritation they caused her all the more acute.

I don't agree with Lucile Wollaston's diagnosis, that Paula could notabide Wallace merely because he refused to lose his head over her, butthere was a grain of truth in it. What she unconsciously resented was thefundamental unreality of his attitude to her. Actually, he did not likeher, but the relation he had selected as appropriate to the first Mrs.Wollaston's successor was one of innocent devotion and he stuck,indefatigably, to the pose. So the chance to put his serviceability tothe proof in consternating circumstances like these, afforded her asubtle satisfaction. He'd brought it upon himself, hadn't he? At least itwas he and no other who had put Mary up to the part she had played.

None of this, of course, came to the surface at all in the scene betweenthem. She was gentler than was her wont with him, very appealing, subduednearer to his own scale of manners than he had ever seen her before. Butshe did not, for a fact, allow him much time to think.

He asked her, with a touch of embarrassment, whether John was fully inher confidence concerning this startling project, and if she had won hisassent to it.

"He knows all about it," she said--and with no consciousness of a_suppressio veri_ here. "We hardly talked of anything else all lastnight. I didn't get to sleep till four. He doesn't like it, but then youcouldn't expect he would. For that matter neither do I. Oh, you don'tknow how I hate it! But I think he sees it has to be. Anyhow, he didn'ttry very hard to keep me from going on with it--And Mary, of course, isperfectly satisfied."

Even his not very alert ear caught something equivocal in those lastsentences, and he looked at her sharply.

"Oh, I'm worn to ribbons over it!" she exclaimed, and this touch ofapology served for the tearing edge there had been in her voice. "Icouldn't let him see how I feel about it. It would be a sort of relief tohave it settled. That's why I came straight to you to-day."

He tried, but rather feebly, to temporize. We mustn't let haste drive usfarther than we really wanted to go. The matter of drawing the formalcontract, for instance, must be attended with all possible legalsafe-guards, especially when we were dealing with a person whose honorwas perhaps dubitable.

"I thought we might go round to see Rodney Aldrich about it, now," shesaid. "He's about the best there is in that line, isn't he? Why don't youtelephone to his office and find out if he's there."

This seemed as good a straw as any to clutch at. The chance of catchingas busy a man as Aldrich with a leisure half hour was very slim. Therecording angel who guarded his wicket gate would probably give them anappointment for some day next week, and this would leave time for aconfirmatory talk with John. But, unluckily, Rodney was there and wouldbe glad to see Mrs. Wollaston as soon as she could be brought round.

"Then, that's all right," Paula said with a sigh of relief. "So if youreally believe I'll keep my word and don't mind putting up the money forme, it's as good as settled."

There was one more question on his tongue. "Does John know that you havecome to me for it?" But this, somehow, he could not force himself to ask.Implicitly she had already answered it--hadn't she?

"Of course I believe, in you, in everything, my dear Paula. And I'm verymuch--touched, that you should have come to me. And my only hope is thatit may turn out to have been altogether for the best."

And there was that.

It was not until late that night that his misgivings as to the part Marymight have played in this drama really awoke, but when they did hemarveled that they had not occurred to him earlier. He recalled that Maryhad prophesied during their talk at the Saddle and Cycle that Paula wouldattribute to her the suggestion--whoever might make it--that an operaticcareer for John's wife was desirable and necessary for financial reasons.She had said too, in that serious measured way of hers, "If Paula eversaw me coming between her and father, whether it was my doing or not, shewould hate me with her whole heart."

Had that prediction been justified? There were half a dozen phrases thatPaula had allowed herself to use this afternoon, which added up to areasonable certainty that it was altogether justified. It was not easyfor him to admit to himself that he didn't like Paula; that he knew herand had long known her for a person incapable of following any lead savethat of her own primitive straightforward desires.

His self-communings reached down deeper into him than they had done formany a long year. He convicted himself, before his vigil was over, offlagrant cowardice in having allowed Mary to undertake the burden of thatrevelation. What harm would it have done any one, even himself, beyond anhour's discomfort, to have drawn down Paula's lightnings on his own head?Her enmity, even though it were permanent, could not seriously havechanged the tenor of his ways.

But to Mary, such a thing could easily be a first-class disaster. CouldJohn be relied upon to come whole-heartedly to her defense. No, he couldnot. Indeed--this was the thought that made Wallace gasp as from a dashof cold water in the face--John's anger at this interference with hisaffairs and at the innocent agent of it was likely to be as hot as hiswife's. Momentarily anyhow. What a perfectly horrible situation to haveforced the girl into;--that fragile sensitive young thing!

And now above all other times, when, for some reason not fully known tohim, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing tomanage. He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how shehad flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tenseemotion if he couldn't find her a job. It had been that very night,hadn't it?--when Paula had given that recital of Anthony March'ssongs--that she had disappeared out of the midst of things and never comeback during the whole evening. When one considered her courage a flightlike that told a good deal.

Then there had been that something a little short of an engagement withGraham Stannard, which must have distressed her horribly;--any one with aspirit as candid as hers and with as honest a hatred of all that wasequivocal. The family had seemed to think that it would all come outright in the end somehow, yet the last time she had talked with him shehad said, cutting straight through the disguise his thought had hiddenitself behind, "I know I can't ever marry Graham."

And it was a young girl harassed with perplexities like these, whom hehad permitted in his stead to beard the lioness. Well, if there wasanything in the world, any conceivable thing, that he could do to repairthe consequences of his fault, he would do it. If that lovers'misunderstanding with Graham could, after all, be cleared away it wouldbe the happy, the completely desirable solution of the problem. But if itcould not ... A day-dream that it was he who stood in Graham Stannard'sshoes, offering her harbor and rest and a life-long loyalty, formed thebridge over which he finally fell asleep.

She called him to the telephone the next morning while he was atbreakfast; just to tell him she was in town, she said, and to ask him ifhe had heard anything from his sister in Omaha as to whether she wanted anursery governess. He had to admit, of course, that he had not evenwritten to her, and felt guiltier and more miserable than ever.

"Do write to-day, though, won't you?" she urged. "And give me the bestcharacter you can. Because I am going to get some sort of job just assoon as possible."

In reply to the inarticulate noise of protest he made at this she wenton, "Our family has simply exploded. I fled for my life last night. Soyou see I'm really in earnest about going to work now."

"I want to come and see you at once," he said. "Where are you?"

"At home," she answered, "but I'm going out this minute for the day. Ifyou'd like a picnic tea here at half past five, though, come and I'lltell you what I've been doing."

He asked if this meant that she was staying all by herself in theDearborn Avenue house without even a servant, and at his lively horrorover this she laughed with an amusement which sounded genuine enough toreassure him somewhat. She ended the conversation by telling him that shehad left her father with the impression that she was going straight toHickory Hill. She was writing Aunt Lucile a note saying she meant to stayin town for a few days. "But if you get any frantic telephone calls inthe meantime, tell them I'm all right."

He wondered a good deal, as his hours marched past in their accustomeduneventful manner, what she could be doing with hers. It was an oddlocution for her to have employed that she was "going out for the day."He couldn't square it with any sort of social activity. The thing thatkept plaguing his mind despite his impatient attempts to dismiss it asnonsense, was the possibility that she was actually looking for that jobshe'd talked about. Answering advertisements!

Toward four, when he had stopped trying to do anything but wait for hisappointment with her, Rush and Graham came in, precipitately, and askedfor a private talk with him. He took them into his inner office, relieveda little at the arrival of reenforcements but disappointed too.

"If you're anxious about Mary," he began by saying, "I can assure youthat she is all right. She's at the Dearborn Avenue house, or was lastnight and will be again later this afternoon. I talked to her on thephone this morning."

"Thank God!" said Rush.

Graham dropped into a chair with a gesture of relief even moreexpressive.

Rush explained the cause of their alarm. Old Pete had driven in toHickory Hill around two o'clock with a letter, addressed to Mary, fromPaula, and on being asked to explain offered the disquieting informationthat she had left Ravinia for the farm, the afternoon before. They haddriven straight to town and to Wallace as the likeliest source ofinformation.

In the emotional back-lash from his profound disquiet about his sister,suddenly reassured that there was nothing--well, tragic to beapprehended, Rush allowed himself an outburst of brotherly indignation.He'd like to know what the devil Mary meant by giving them a fright likethat. Why hadn't she telephoned last night? Nothing was easier thanthat. Or more to the point still, why hadn't she come straight out tothe farm as she had told her father she meant to do, instead of spendingthe night in town?

Wallace would have let him go on, since it gave him a little time hewanted for deciding what line to take. But Graham, it seemed,couldn't stand it.

"Shut up, Rush!" he commanded. (You are to remember that he was threeyears his partner's senior.) "Mary never did an--inconsiderate thing inher life. If she seems to have forgotten about us, you can be dead surethere's a reason."

"I agree with Stannard," Wallace put in, "that she wants to be dealtwith--gently. She must have been having a rather rotten time."

He hadn't yet made up his mind how far to take them into his confidenceas to what he knew and guessed, but Rush made an end of his hesitation.

"Tell us, for heaven's sake, what it's all about.--Oh, you needn'tmind Graham. He's as much in it as any of us. I suppose you know howhe stands."

Wallace was conscious of an acute wish that they had not turned up untilhe'd had a chance to see Mary, but somehow he felt he couldn't go behindan assurance like that. So he told them what he had pieced together.

Rush grunted and blushed and said he'd be damned, but it was not atheme--this contention between his father and his stepmother--that hecould dwell upon. He got hold at last of something that he could bearticulate about, and demanded to know why, in these circumstances, Maryhadn't come straight to them at Hickory Hill instead of camping out, forthe night, all by herself in the Dearborn Avenue house.

"She has an idea she must find a job for herself," Wallace said, feelingawkwardly guilty as if he had betrayed her; but the way Rush leaped uponhim, demanding in one breath what the deuce he meant and what sort of jobhe was talking about, made it impossible to pull up.

He recounted the request Mary had made of him, concerning his sister inOmaha, and, last of all, stated his own misgiving--nothing but the merestguess of course--that she had been putting in this day answeringadvertisements. "She said she'd give me a picnic tea at five-thirty andtell me what she'd been doing."

"Well, it'll be no picnic for her," Rush exploded angrily. "I'll see herat five-thirty myself. She must be plumb out of her head if she thinksshe'll be allowed to do a thing like that."

Once more, before Wallace could speak, it was Graham who intervened. "Iwant you to leave this to me," he said gravely. "I don't know whether Ican settle it or not, but I'd like to try." He turned to Wallace."Would you mind, sir, letting me go to tea with her at half past fivein your place?"

It is possible that, but for Wallace's day-dream of himself offeringMary the shelter and the care she so obviously needed, he might havepersisted in seeing her first and assuring her that he was to beregarded as an ally whatever she decided to do. Her voice as she hadsaid, "I know I can never marry Graham" echoed forlornly in his mind'sear. But a doubt faint and vague as it was, of his own disinterestednessheld him back. Graham was young; he was in love with her. That gave himright of way, didn't it?

So he assented. It was agreed that Rush should dine with Wallace at hisapartment. Graham, if he had any news for them should communicate it bytelephone. Instantly!

CHAPTER XXII

THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

The instinct to conceal certain moods of depression and distress togetherwith the histrionic power to make the concealment possible may be aserious peril to a woman of Mary Wollaston's temperament. She had managedat the telephone that morning to deceive Wallace pretty completely. Evenher laugh had failed to give her away.

She was altogether too near for safety to the point of exhaustion. Shehad endured her second night without sleep. She had not really eaten anadequate meal since her lunch in town the day Paula had engineered herout of the way for that talk with Maxfield Ware.

There was nothing morbid in her resolution to find, at the earliestpossible moment, some way of making herself independent of her father'ssupport. Having pointed out Paula's duty as a bread winner she could notneglect her own, however dreary the method might be, or humble theresults. In any mood, of course, the setting out in search of employmentwould have been painful and little short of terrifying to one brought upthe way Mary had been.

A night's sleep though and a proper breakfast would have kept the thingfrom being a nightmare. As it was, she felt, setting out with herclipping from the help-wanted columns of a morning paper, a good deallike the sole survivor of some shipwreck, washed up upon an unknowncoast, venturing inland to discover whether the inhabitants werecannibals. Even the constellations in her sky were strange.

Where, then, was Anthony March? Nowhere above her horizon, to-day at allevents. The memory of him had been with her much of the two lastsleepless nights. She had told over the tale of her moments with himagain and again. (Did any one, she might have wondered, ever love asdeeply with so small a treasury of golden hours for memory to draw upon?)But she could not, somehow, relate him at all to her present or herfuture. Her love for him was an out-going rather than an in-coming thing.At least, her thoughts had put the emphasis upon that side of it; uponthe longing to comfort and protect him, to be the satisfaction to all hiswants. Not--passionately not--to cling heavily about his neck, drag athis feet, steal his wayfarer's liberty,--no, not the smallest moment ofit! This present helplessness of hers then, which heightened her need forhim, served also to bolt the doors of her thoughts against him.

Her recollection of the next few hours, though it contained somevignettes so sharp and deeply bitten in as to be, she fancied,ineffaceable, was in the main confused. She must have called upon ten ora dozen advertisers in various suburban districts of the city (sheavoided addresses that were too near home and names where she suspectedhers might be known). Her composite impression was of flat thin voiceswhich she could imagine in excitement becoming shrill; of curiousappraising stares; of a vast amount of garrulous irrelevancy; of a noteof injury that one who could profess so little equipment beyond good willshould so disappoint the expectation her first appearance had aroused.The background was a room--it seemed to have been in every case thesame--expensively overfurnished, inexpressive, ill-fitting its uses, likea badly chosen ready-made coat. The day was not without its humors, orwhat would have been humors if her spirit could have rebounded to them.Chiefly, the violent antagonism she found aroused in two or three casesby the color of her hair.

The residuum of her pilgrimages was three addresses where she might callabout the middle of next week, in person or by telephone, to learn theadvertiser's decision. Well it would convince Wallace Hood that she wasin earnest. That was something.

Wallace's coming to tea became, as the day wore on, more and moresomething to look forward to. All the things about him which in moreresilient hours she had found irritating or absurd, his neutrality, hisappropriateness, his steady unimaginative way of going always one stepat a time, seemed now precisely his greatest merits. The thought of teain his company even aroused a faint appetite for food in her and lentzest to her preparations for it. When she stopped at the neighborhoodcaterer's shop for supplies she bought some tea cakes in addition to thesandwiches she had ordered in the morning. She had managed to get homein good enough season to restore the drawing-room somewhat to itsinhabited appearance, to set out her tea table, put on her kettle, andthen go up-stairs and change her dress for something that was not wiltedby the day's unusual heat. She was ready then to present before Wallacean _ensemble_ which should match pretty well her tone at the telephonethis morning.

But when she answered the ring she supposed was his and flinging open thedoor saw Graham Stannard there instead, she got a jarring shock which heroverstrung nerves were in no condition to endure.

"I persuaded Mr. Hood to let me come to tea in his place," he said."It was rather cheeky of me to ask him, I'm afraid. I hope you willforgive me."

The arrest of all her processes of thought at sight of him lasted onlythe barest instant. Then her mind flashed backward through a surmisewhich embraced the whole series of events. An alarm at Hickory Hill overher failure to arrive (which somehow they had been led to expect), adash by Graham (Rush not available, perhaps), into town for news. ToWallace Hood, of course. And Wallace had betrayed her. In the interest ofromantic sentiment. The happy ending given its chance. A rich youngadoring husband instead of a job as nursery governess in Omaha!

It took no longer for all that to go through her mind than Graham neededfor his little explanatory speech on the door-step. There he stoodwaiting for her answer. The only choice she had was between shutting thedoor in his face without a word, or graciously inviting him to come inand propose to her--for the last time, at all events. It was not, ofcourse, a choice at all.

"I'm afraid it's a terribly hot day for tea," she said, moving back fromthe doorway to make room for him to come in. "Wallace likes it, though. Imight make you something cold if only I had ice, but of course thereisn't any in the house. It's nice and cool, though, isn't it; from havingbeen shut up so long?"

Anything,--any frantic thing that could be spun into words to cover thefact that she had no welcome for him at all, not even the most wan littlebeam of friendly tenderness. She had seen the hurt look come into hiseyes, incipient panic at the flash of anger which had not been meant forhim. She must float him inside, somehow, and anchor him to the tea table.There she could get herself together and deal with him--decently.

He came along, tractably enough, sat in the chair that was to havebeen Wallace's, and talked for a while of the tea, and how hot it wasthis afternoon, and how beautifully cool in here. It was hot, too, outat Hickory Hill but one thought little of it. The air was drier forone thing. He and Rush had commented on the difference as they drovein to-day.

"Oh, Rush came in with you, did he?" she observed.

He flushed and stammered over the admission and it was easy to guess why.The fact that her brother, as well as Wallace, was lurking in thebackground somewhere waiting for results gave an official cast to hiscall that was rather--asinine. She came to the rescue.

"I suppose he and Wallace had something they wanted to talk about," shecommented easily, and he made haste to assent.

She steadied herself with a breath. "Did Wallace tell you," she asked,"about our explosion at Ravinia over Paula's new contract? And howfurious both father and Paula are with me about it? And how I'm outlooking for a job? He didn't say anything about his sister, did he;whether he'd written to her to-day or not?"

"Not whether he'd written. But he told us the rest. How you wanted to goto work. As a nursery governess."

He paused there but she did not break in upon it. She had given him allthe lead he needed. With the deliberate care that a suddenly tremuloushand made necessary he put down his teacup and spoke as if addressing it.

"I think you're the bravest--most wonderful person in the world. Ofcourse, I've known that always. Not just since I came back last spring.But this, that Mr. Hood told us this afternoon, somehow--caps the climax.I can't tell you how it--got me, to think of your being ready to do--athing like that."

The last thing she would have done voluntarily was to put any obstaclesin his way. Her program, on the contrary was to help him along all shecould to his declaration, make a refusal that should be as gentle as wasconsistent with complete finality, and then get rid of him beforeanything regrettably--messy ensued. But to have her courage rhapsodizedover like this was a thing she could not endure.

"It's nothing," she said rather dryly, "beyond what most girls donowadays as a matter of course. I'm being rather cowardly about it, Ithink--on account of some silly ideas I've been more or less brought upwith perhaps, but..."

"What if they do?" he broke in; "thousands of them at the stores and inthe offices. It's bad enough for them--for any sort of woman. But it'sdifferent with you. It's horrible. You aren't like them."

She tried to check herself but couldn't. "What's the difference? I'mhealthy and half-educated and fairly young. I have the same sort, prettymuch, of thoughts and feelings. I don't believe I like being clean andwarm and well-fed and amused and admired any better than the average girldoes. I ought to have found a job months ago, instead of letting Rushbring me home from New York. Or else gone to work when I came home. Butevery one was so horrified..."

"They were right to be," he interrupted. "It is a horrible idea. Becauseyou aren't like the others. You _haven't_ the same sort of thoughts andfeelings. A person doesn't have to be in love with you to see that. Yourfather and Rush and Mr. Hood all see it. And as for me--well, I couldn'tendure it, that's all. Oh, I know, you can act like anybody else; laughand dance and talk nonsense and make a person forget sometimes. But theother thing is there all the while--shining through--oh, it can't betalked about!--like a light. Of--of something a decent man _wants_ to beguided by, whatever he does. And for you to go out into the world withthat, where there can't be any protection at all ... I can't stand it,Mary. That's why I came to-day instead of Mr. Hood."

She went very white during that speech and tears came up into her eyes.Tears of helpless exasperation. It was such a cruelly inhuman thing toimpose an ideal like that upon a woman. It was so smug, so utterlysatisfactory to all romantic sentimentalists. Wallace would approve everyword of it. Wallace had sent him to say just this;--was waiting now to betold the good news of his success.

The fact is worth recalling, perhaps, that away back in her childhoodWallace had sometimes reduced her to much this sort of franticexasperation by his impregnable assumption that she was the white-souledlittle angel she looked. Sitting here in this very room he had goaded herinto committing freakish misdemeanors.

She was resisting now an impulse of much the same sort, though theparallel did not, of course, occur to her. It was just a sort ofinexplicable panic which she was reining in with all her might by tellingherself how fond she really was of Graham and how terrible a thing itwould be if she hurt him unnecessarily. She dared not attempt to speak soshe merely waited. She was sitting relaxed, her head lowered, her chinsupported by one hand. This stillness and relaxation she always resortedto in making any supreme demand upon her self-control.

He looked at her rather helplessly once or twice during the silence. Thenarose and moved about restlessly.

"I know you don't love me. I've gone on hoping you could after I supposeI might have seen it wasn't possible. You've tried to and you can't. Idon't know if one as white as you could love any man--that way. Well, I'mnot going to ask any more for that. I want to ask, instead, that we befriends. I haven't spoiled the possibility of that, have I?"

She was taken utterly by surprise. It didn't seem possible that she hadeven heard aright and the face he turned to, as he asked that lastquestion, was of one pitiably bewildered, yet lighted too by a gleam ofgratitude.

"You really mean that, Graham?" she asked in a very ragged voice. "Isthat what you came to-day to tell me?"

"I mean it altogether," he said earnestly. "I mean it withoutany--reservations at all. You must believe that because it's the--basisfor everything else."

She repeated "everything else?" in clear interrogation; then dropped backrather suddenly into her former attitude. Everything else! What else wasthere to friendship but itself?

He turned back to the window. "I've come to ask you to, marry me, Mary,just the same. I couldn't be any good as a friend, couldn't take care ofyou and try to make you happy, unless in the eyes of the world I was yourhusband. But I wouldn't ask,--I promise you I wouldn't askanything,--anything at all. You do understand, don't you? You'd be justas--sacred to me ..."

Then he cried out in consternation at the sight of her, "Mary!What is it?"

The tension had become too great, that was all. Her self-control,slackened by the momentarily held belief that it was not needed,had snapped.

"I understand well enough," she said. "You would say good night at mybedroom door and good morning at the breakfast table. I've read ofarrangements like that in rather nasty-minded novels, but I didn'tsuppose they existed anywhere else. I can't think of an existence moredegradingly sensual than that;--to go on for days and months and yearsbeing 'sacred' to a man; never satisfying the desires your nearnesstortured him with--to say nothing of what you did with your own!

"But that such a thing should be offered to me because I'm too good tolove a man honestly.... You see, I'm none of the things you think I am,Graham. Nor that you want me to be. Not white, not innocent. Not a 'good'woman even, let alone an angel. That's what makes it so--preposterous."

He had been staring at her, speechless, horrified. But at this it was asif he understood. "I ought not to have worried you to-day," he said,suddenly gentle. "I know how terribly overwrought you are. I meant--Ionly meant to make things easier. I'm going away now. I'll send Rush toyou. He'll come at once. Do you mind being alone till then?"

She answered slowly and with an appearance of patientreasonableness, "It's not that. It's not what Rush callsshell-shock. There is many a shabby little experimental flirt whohas managed to keep intact an-innocence which I don't possess. Thatis the simple-physiological truth."

Then, after a silence, with a gasp, "I'm not mad. But I think I shall beif you go on looking at me like that. Won't you please go?"

CHAPTER XXIII

THE TERROR

Graham Stannard made his well-meant but disastrous proposal to Mary athalf past five or so on a Friday afternoon. It was a little more thantwenty-four hours later, just after dark on Saturday evening, that shecame in, unheralded, more incredibly like a vision than ever, uponAnthony March in his secret lair above the grocery.

He was sitting at his work-table scoring a passage in the third act of_The Dumb Princess_ for the wood-wind choir when her knock, faint as itwas, breaking in upon the rhythm of his theme, caused his pen to leapaway from the paper and his heart to skip a beat. But had it actuallybeen a knock upon his door? Such an event was unlikely enough.

He uttered a tentative and rather incredulous "Come in" as one justawakened speaks, humoring the illusion of a dream.

But the door opened and the Dumb Princess stood there, pallid, wistful,just as she had looked before her true lover climbed the precarious ivyto her tower and tore away the spell that veiled her.

March sat debating with himself,--or so it seemed to him afterward; itwas a matter of mere seconds, of course,--why, since she was a vision,did she not look as she had on one of the occasions when he had seen her.The night of the Whitman songs; the blazing afternoon in the hay field.

She was different to-night, and very clearly defined, in a plainlittle frock of dark blue--yet not quite what one ordinarily meant bydark blue--cut out in an unsoftened square around the neck, and asmall hat of straw, the color of the warmer sort of bronze. Theseausterities of garb, dissociated utterly with all his memories, gaveher a poignancy that was almost unbearable. Why had the vision of hercome to him like that?

She smiled then and spoke. "It is really I. I've come with amessage for you."

Until she spoke he could do nothing but stare as one would at anhallucinatory vision; but her voice, the first articulate syllable of it,brought him to his feet and drew him across the room to where she stood.He was almost suffocated by a sudden convulsion of the heart, halfexultation, half terror. The exultation was accountable enough. The highGods had given him another chance. Why he should be terrified he did notat the time know, but he was--from that very first moment.

He came to her slowly, not knowing what he was to do or say. All hismental powers were for the moment quite in abeyance. But when he gotwithin hand's reach of her it was given to him to take both of hers andstoop and kiss them. He'd have knelt to her had his knees ever beenhabituated to prayer. Then he led her to his big hollow-backed easy chairwhich stood in the dormer where the breeze came in, changed its positiona little and waited until, with a faintly audible sigh, she had letherself sink into it.

How tired she was! He had become aware of that the moment he touched herhands. Whatever her experience during the last days or weeks had been, ithad brought her to the end of her powers.

He felt another pang of that unaccountable terror as he turned away, andhe put up an unaddressed prayer for spiritual guidance. It was a newhumility for him. He moved his own chair a little nearer, but not close,and seated himself.

"I can conceive of no message,"--they were the first words he hadspoken, and his voice was not easily manageable,--"no message that wouldbe more than nothing compared with the fact that you have come." Risingagain, he went on, "Won't you let me take your hat? Then the back of thatchair won't be in the way."

It was certainly a point in his favor that she took it off and gave it tohim without demur. That meant that there would be time; yet her verydocility frightened him. She seemed quite relaxed now that her head couldlie back against the leather cushion, and her gaze traveled about thedingy littered room with a kind of tender inquisitiveness as if she werememorizing its contents.

He gazed at her until a gush of tears blinded his eyes and he turned,blinking them away, to the untidy quires of score paper which he hadtried to choose instead. It could not be that it was too late to alterthat choice. The terror, for a moment, became articulate. She believedthat it was too late. That was why she had come.

She spoke reflectively. "It would be called an accident, I suppose, thatI came. I wrote to you but there was more to the message than would goeasily in a note so I took it myself to your house. There was just achance, I thought, that I'd find you there. I didn't find you, but Ifound Miss MacArthur. That was the only thing about it that could becalled accidental. Your mother and sister were worried about you. Theysaid it had been much longer than such periods usually were since theyhad heard from you. So I left my note and was coming away. MissMacArthur said she would come with me and offered to drive me back totown. When we got into her car she said she thought she knew where youwere and would take me to you. She did not say anything more nor ask anyquestions until she had stopped outside here at the curb, when shelooked up and saw the lighted windows and said you were surely here.Then she pointed out the place in the dark where the stairs were andtold me how to find your door. She waited, though, to make sure beforeshe drove away. I heard her go."

He had no word to say in the little pause she made there. He felt thepulse beating in his temples and clutched with tremulous hands the woodenarms of his chair. Until she had mentioned Jennie MacArthur's name it hadnot occurred to him to wonder how she had been enabled to come to him. Itcould only have been through Jennie, of course. Jennie was the onlyperson who knew. But why had Jennie disclosed his secret (her own at thesame time, he was sure; she never would have expected Mary's clear eyeseven to try to evade the unescapable inference)--why had she revealed toMary, whom she had never seen before, a fact which she had guarded withso impregnable a loyalty all these many years?

The only possible answer was that Jennie had divined, under the girl'swell-bred poise, the desperation which was now terrifying him. It was nonightmare then of his own overwrought imagination. Jennie had perceivedthe emergency--the actual life-or-death emergency--and with courageousinspiration had done, unhesitatingly, the one thing that could possiblymeet the case. She had given him his chance. Jennie!

He arrived at that terminus just as Mary finished speaking. In the pausethat followed she did not at first look at him. Her gaze had come to restupon that abortive musical typewriter of his. Not quite in focus upon it,but as if in some corner of her mind she was wondering what it might be.But as the pause spun itself out, her glance, seeking his face, movedquickly enough to catch the look of consternation that it wore. She readit--misread it luckily--and her own lighted amazingly with a beam of pureamusement.

"I suppose it is rather overwhelming," she said; "a conjunction likethat. I mean, that it should have been she who brought me here. Butreally, unless one accepts all the traditional motives and explanationsthat one finds in books, it shouldn't be surprising that she shouldundertake a friendly service for some one else she saw was fond of you,too. Not when one considers the wonderful person she is."

If his sheer adoration of her were enough to save her then she was safe,whatever the peril. But he doubted if it would be enough.

"Jennie and I were lovers once," he said. "But that came to an end forboth of us a good while ago. Two or three years. And the last time shecame to this room--one day in April it was--I told her about you andabout _The Dumb Princess_." He laid his hand upon the stack ofmanuscript. "This. I had come home from that night at your father's housewhen you and I heard that song together, with my head full of it. I wentnearly mad fighting it out of my head while I tried to make over thatother opera for Paula."

"_The Dumb Princess_...?"

He nodded. "You see you hardly spoke that night, only at the end to saywe mustn't talk. So I came away thinking of some one under a spell. Aprincess, the fairy sort of princess who could not speak until her truelover came to her. But instead of that I tried to go on working at thatBelgian horror and stuck at it until it was unendurable. And then, when Icame to the house to tell Paula so, it was you who came to me again, thefirst time since that night."

There had come a faintly visible color into her cheeks and once more shesmiled, reflectively. "That's what you meant then," she mused. "Icouldn't make it out. You said just before you went away, 'That's why itwas so incredible when you came down the stairs instead.'"

She had remembered that!

"I ran away," he confessed, "the moment I had said it, for fear ofbetraying myself. And I went to work on _The Dumb Princess_ that day."

"You've done all that, a whole opera, since the fourteenth of May?"

"I worked on it," he said, "until I had to stop for the little vacationthat--that ended at Hickory Hill. And I came straight back to it fromthere. I've been working at it all the time since. Now, except for thescoring in the second part of the third act, it's finished. I thought itwas the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. Just to getit written down on paper, the thing which that moment with you up in thatlittle anteroom started. I've pretty well done it. As far as the musicitself is concerned, I think I have done it."

He paused there and pressed his lips together. Then he went on speaking,stiffly, one word at a time. "And I was saying to myself when you knockedthat I would tear it up, every sheet of it, and set it alight in thestove yonder if it would take me back to that hour we had together atHickory Hill."

The tenderness of her voice when she replied (it had some of thecharacteristic qualities of his beloved woodwinds) did not preclude abead of humor, almost mischief, from gilding the salient points ofits modeling.

"I know," she said. "I can guess what that feeling must be; the perfectemptiness and despair of having a great work done. I suspect there aren'tmany great masterpieces that one couldn't have bought cheap by offeringthe mess of pottage at the right moment. Oh, no, I didn't mean a sneerwhen I said cheap. I really understand. That very next morning out in theorchard, thinking over it, I managed to be glad you'd gone--alone. Yourown way, rather than back with me to Ravinia. But--I'm glad I cameto-night and I'm glad I know about--_The Dumb Princess_."

Watching her as her unfocused reminiscent gaze made it easy for him todo, he saw her go suddenly pale, saw the perspiration bead out on herforehead as if some thought her mind had found itself confrontingactually sickened her. He waited an instant, breathless in an agony ofdoubt whether to notice or to go on pretending to ignore. After a momentthe wave passed.

"I know that was a figure of speech," she resumed,--her voice wasdeadened a little in timbre but its inflections were as light as before."But I wish--I'd really be ever so much--happier--if you'd give me apromise; a perfectly serious, solemn,"--she hesitated for a word andsmiled,--"death-bed promise, that you never will burn up _The DumbPrincess_. At least until she's all published and produced. And I wishthat as soon as you've got a copy made, you'd put this manuscript in areally safe place."

He turned away from her, baffled, bewildered. She had evaded the issue hehad tried to confront her with. She had taken the passionate declarationof his wish to retrieve the great error of his life as a passing emotionfamiliar to all creative artists at certain stages in their work. It wasa natural, almost inevitable, way of looking at it! He sat for a momentgazing abstractedly at his littered table, clutching the edges of it withboth hands, resisting a momentary vertigo of his own.

She left her chair and came and stood beside him. She picked up one ofthe quires of manuscript, opened it and gazed a while at the many-stavedscore. He was aware of a catch in her breathing, like an inaudible sob,but presently she spoke, quite steadily.

"I wish I could sit here to-night and read this. I wish it made evenunheard melodies to me. I'm not dumb but I am deaf to this. _There's_ aspell beyond your powers to lift, my dear."

She laid her hand lightly upon his shoulder and at her touch histaut-drawn muscles relaxed into a tremulous weakness. After alittle silence:

"Now give me my promise," she said.

He did not immediately answer and the hand upon his shoulder took hold.Under its compulsion, "I'll promise anything you ask," he said.

She spoke slowly as if measuring her words. "Never to destroy this workof yours that you call _The Dumb Princess_ whatever may conceivablyhappen, however discouraged you may be about it."

"Very well," he said, "I won't."

"Say it as a promise," she commanded. "Quite explicitly."

So he repeated a form of words which satisfied her. She held him tight inboth hands for an instant. Then swiftly went back to her chair.

"Don't think me too foolish," she apologized. "I haven't been sleepingmuch of late and I couldn't have slept to-night with a misgiving likethat to wonder about."

His own misgiving obscurely deepened. He did not know whether it was thereason she had offered for exacting that promise from him or the meretone of her voice which was lighter and more brittle than he felt itshould have been. She must have read the troubled look in his face forshe said at once and on a warmer note:

"Oh, my dear, don't! Don't let my vagaries trouble you. Let me tell youthe message I came with. It's about the other opera. They want to put iton at once up at Ravinia. With Fournier as the officer and that littleSpanish soprano as 'Dolores.' Just as you wrote it without any of theterrible things you tried to put in for Paula. It will have to be sungin French of course, because neither of them sings English. They want youthere just as soon as you can come, to sign the contract and help withthe rehearsals."

Once more with an utterly unexpected shift she left him floundering,speechless.

He had forgotten _The Outcry_ except for his nightmare efforts to revampit for Paula; had charged it off his books altogether. What Mary had toldhim at Hickory Hill about her labors in its behalf had signified simply,how rapturously delicious it was that she should have been so concernedfor him. The possibility of a successful outcome to her efforts hadn'toccurred to him.

She said, smiling with an amused tenderness over his confusion, "Ihaven't been too officious, have I?"

He knew he was being mocked at and he managed to smile but he hadto blink and press his hand to his eyes again before he could seeher clearly.

"It's not astonishing that you can work miracles," he said. "The wonderwould be if you could not."

"There was nothing in the least miraculous about this," she declared. "Itwasn't done by folding my wings and weaving mystic circles with a wand.Besides making that translation,--oh, terribly bad, I'm afraid,--intoFrench, I've cajoled and intrigued industriously for weeks like one ofthose patient wicked little spiders of Henri Fabre's. I found a sillyflirtation between Fournier and a married woman I knew and I encouragedit, helped it along and made it useful. I've used everybody I could laymy hands on."

What an instrument of ineffable delight that voice of hers was,--itschalumeau tenderness just relieved with the sparkle of irony. But he wassmitten now with the memory of his own refusal to go to Ravinia so thatPaula would remember him again. He blurted out something of hiscontrition over this but she stopped him.

"It was only because I wanted you there. I would not for any conceivableadvantage in the world have let you--oh, even touch these devices thatI've been concerned with. But I've reveled in them myself. In doing themfor you, even though I could not see that they were getting anywhere.

"Everything seemed quite at a standstill when I left Ravinia Thursday,but on Thursday night the Williamsons dined with Mr. Eckstein and went tothe park with him; and they all went home with father and Paulaafterward, Fournier and LaChaise, too; and everything happened at once. Igot a note from Paula this morning written yesterday, asking where mytranslation was, but not telling me anything. And as she wasn't at homewhen I telephoned to answer her question I didn't know until to-night.

"But about six o'clock James Wallace telephoned from the park and toldme all about it. He wanted you found and sent to Ravinia at once. Havingwasted half the season and more, they're now quite frantic over thethought of losing a minute. And Jimmy says immensely enthusiastic. So,all you have to do now is to go up there and lord it over them. You'llhear it sung; you'll hear the orchestra play it. You will make abeginning toward coming into your own, my dear. Because even if youdon't care for it as you did, it will be a step toward--the princess,won't it?"

She dropped back against the cushion as from weariness, and sudden tearsbrimmed into her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. He came to her at thatin spite of the gesture that would have held him away.

"You must believe--it's nothing--but happiness," she gasped.

He sat down upon the arm of the chair and a little timidly took her inhis hands, caressed her eyes and her wet face until at last she met hislips in a long kiss and sank back quieted.

He stayed on the chair arm however and their hands remained claspedthrough a recollecting silence. She said presently:

"There are two or three practical things for you to remember. You mustn'tbe irritated with Violet Williamson. She has let herself become a littlemore sentimental about Fournier than I think in the beginning she meantto be and you may find her under foot more than you like. You mustn'tmind that. And you'll find a very friendly helper in James Wallace. Thereis something a little caustic about his wit, and he suspects musicians onprinciple; but he will like you and he's thoroughly committed to _TheOutcry_. He is a very good French scholar and over difficulties with thetranslation, where passages have to be changed, he'll be a present help."

He took her face in both his hands and turned it up to him. "Mary," hedemanded when their eyes met, "why are you saying good-by to me?"

CHAPTER XXIV

THE WHOLE STORY

The shot told. The harried, desperate look of panic with which she gazedat him and tried, tugging at his hands, to turn away, revealed to himthat he had leaped upon the truth. Part of it anyhow. He closed hiseyes, for an instant, for another unaddressed prayer that he might notfalter nor let himself be turned aside until he had sounded the fulldepth of it.

When he looked at her again she had recovered her poise. "It was silly,"she said, "to think that I could hide that from you. I am goingaway--to-morrow. For quite a long while."

"Are you going away--physically? In the ordinary literal sense, I mean;or is it that you are just--going away from me?"

Once more it was as if a trap had been sprung upon her. But this time heignored the gasp and the sudden cold slackness of the hands he held andwent on speaking with hardly a pause.

"I asked that question, put it that way, thinking perhaps I understoodand that I could make it easier for you to tell me." He broke off, there,for an instant to get his voice under control. Then he asked, steadily,"Are you going to marry Graham Stannard?"

She gasped again, but when he looked up at her there was nothing in herface but an incredulous astonishment.

So there was one alternative shorn away; one that he had not conceived asmore than a very faint possibility. It was not into matrimony that herlong journey was to take her. He pulled himself up with a jerk toanswer--and it must be done smoothly and comfortably--the question shehad just asked him. How in the world had he ever come to think of a thinglike that?

"Why, it was in the air at Hickory Hill those days before you came.And then Sylvia was explicit about it, as something every one washoping for."

"Was that why you went away?" she asked with an intent look into hisface. "Because he had a--prior claim, and it wouldn't be fair to--poachupon his preserves?"

He gave an ironic monosyllable laugh. "I tried, for the next few days tobamboozle myself into adopting that explanation but I couldn't. The truthwas, of course, that I ran away simply because I was frightened. Sheerpanic terror of the thing that had taken hold of me. The thought ofmeeting you that next morning was--unendurable."

She too uttered a little laugh but it sounded like one of pure happiness.She buried her face in his hands and touched each palm with her lips. "Icouldn't have borne it if you'd said the other thing," she told him. "ButI might have trusted you not to. Because you're not a sentimentalist.You're almost the only person I know who is not."

She added a moment later, with a sudden tightening of her grip upon hishands, "Have you, too, discovered that sentimentality is the crudestthing in the world? It is. It is perfectly ruthless. It makes moretragedies than malice. Ludicrous tragedies--which are less endurable thanthe other sort. Unless one were enough of an Olympian so that he couldlaugh." She relaxed again and made a nestling movement toward him. "Ithought for a while of you that way."

He managed to speak as if the idea amused him. "As an Olympian? No, ifI had a mountain it wouldn't be that one. But I like the valleysbetter, anyhow."

"I know," she said contentedly. Then her voice darkened. "I'm just atthe beginning of you--now..." The sentence ended unnaturally, though hehad done nothing to interrupt it.

Deliberately he startled her. "What time does your train go, to-morrow?"he asked. "Or haven't you selected one? You haven't even told me where itis you are going."

Through his hands which held her he felt the shock, the momentary agonyof the effort to recover the threatened balance, the resolute relaxationof the muscles and the steadying breath she drew.

"Oh, there are plenty of trains," she said. "You mustn't bother.--Why,Wallace Hood has a sister living in Omaha. (Wallace Hood, not JamesWallace. It would be terrible if you confused them.) She's been tryingfor months to find a nursery governess. And I've been trying--perhaps youdidn't know; the family have been very unpleasant about it--to find ajob.--Oh, for the most realistic of reasons, among others. Well, itoccurred to me the other day that Wallace's sister and I might be lookingfor each other."

There she paused, but only for a moment. Then she added, very explicitly,"So I'm going to Omaha to-morrow."

Even her lying she had to do honestly. She preferred, he saw, that heshould remember she had lied to having him recall that she had trickedhim by an evasion.

One need not invoke clairvoyance to account for his incandescentcertainty that she had lied. The mere unconscious synthesis of the thingsshe had said and left unsaid along the earlier stages of their talk,would have amounted to a demonstration. Her moment of panic over hisdiscovery that she was saying good-by, her irrespressible shudder at thequestion whether she was going away in the ordinary literal sense of thephrase; finally, her pitiful attempt to avoid, in answer to his lastquestion, a categorical untruth and then her acceptance of it as, afterall, preferable to the other. But it was by no such pedestrian processas this that he reached the truth.

He knew, now, why he had been terrified from the moment she came into theroom. He knew why she had wrung that promise from him--a death-bedpromise she had dared with a smile to call it--that he would not,whatever happened, destroy _The Dumb Princess_. It would be a likelyenough thing for him to do, she had perceived, when he learned the truth.She could not--sleep, she had told him, until that surmise was laid.

There were, as she had said, plenty of trains to that unknown destinationof hers, but he thought that that word sleep offered the true clue. Shewas a physician's daughter; there must be, somewhere in that house, achest or cupboard that would supply what she needed. They'd find her inher own bed, in that room he had once cast a glance into on his wayup-stairs to Paula.

The conviction grew upon him that she had her plans completely laid; yes,and her preparations accomplished. That quiet leisureliness of hers wouldnot have been humanly possible if either her resolution or the means forexecuting it had remained in doubt. It was likely that she had whateverit was--a narcotic, probably; morphine; she wouldn't, conceivably, resortto any of the corrosives--upon her person at this moment. In that littlesilken bag which hung from her wrist.

He clenched the finger-nails into the palms of his hands. This thing wasa nightmare. He had fallen asleep over his table; had only to wakehimself.--It would not do to play with an idea like that. Nor with thepossibility that he had misread her mind. He knew. He was not mistaken.Let him never glance aside from that.

For one moment he thought wildly of trying to call in help from outside,of frustrating her design by sheer force. But that could not be done. Asbetween them, he would be reckoned the madman. Her project might bedeferred by that means, perhaps. It could not be prevented.

It was that terrible self-possession of hers that gave the last turn tothe screw. She could not be dealt with as one frantic, beside herself, tobe wooed and quieted back into a state of sanity. She was at this momentas sane as he. She was not to be held back, either, by a mere assuranceof his love for her. She had never, it appeared, lacked that assurance.But her life, warmed even as it was by their love, presented itself toher somehow as something that it was not possible to go on with.

This was very strange. All of its externals that were visible to himmade up, one would have said, a pattern singularly gracious anduntroubled. Buried in it somewhere there must be some toxic focus thatpoisoned everything. He must meet her on her own ground. He must showher another remedy than the desperate one she was now resolved upon. Andbefore he could find the remedy he must discover the virus. The onlyclue he had was the thing she said about sentimentalists, and thetragedies they caused. More tragedies than malice was responsible for.He thought she was probably right about that. It was some such tragedyanyhow, ludicrous, unendurable, that had driven her to this acquiescencein defeat.

He said, in as even a tone as he could manage, "I asked about trainsbecause I wondered whether there was anything to hurry you to-night.Packing to do or such a matter; or whether we mightn't have a reallyleisurely visit. I haven't much idea what time it is except that I don'tthink I've eaten anything since around the middle of the day. Have you?If you'd stay and have supper with me ... But I suppose you're expectedsomewhere else."

She smiled ironically at this, then laughed at herself. "It happensrather funnily that I haven't been so little expected or looked after,since I came home from New York, as I am to-night. I'm not--in a hurry atall. I'll stay as long as you like."

"Is that a promise?" he asked. "As long as I liked would be a longwhile."

"I'll stay," she said, "as long as I can see I'm making you happy. When Ifind myself beginning to be a--torment to you, I shall--vanish."

He was almost overmastered by the temptation to forget everything excepthis love for her; to let himself be persuaded that his ghastly surmisewas a product of his own fatigue and sleepless nights. Even supposingthere were a basis for it, could he not keep her safe by just holding herfast in his arms?

He dashed the thought out of his mind. She would surrender to hisembrace, how eagerly he already knew. For a matter of moments, for a fewswift hours she might forget. She had perhaps come to him meaning toforget for a while in just that way. But no embrace could be eternal.He'd have to let her go at last and nothing would be changed save thatshe would have a memory of him to take with her into her long sleep.

No, love must wait. That obscure unendurable nightmare tragedy of hersmust be brought out into the light first and shorn of its horrors.

So he managed for the moment a lighter note. He would not let her help inthe preparation of the meager little meal which was all that hisimmediate resources ran to. He hadn't quite realized how exiguous it wasgoing to be when he spoke of it as supper. It was nothing but a slice ofSwiss cheese, a fresh carton of biscuits and a flagon of so-calledChianti illicitly procured from the Italian grocery downstairs.

He cleared his work table and anchored her in the easy chair at thesame time by putting into her lap the bulky manuscript of _The DumbPrincess_, and it was this they talked about while he laid the cloth--aclean towel--and set out his scanty array of dishes. He feared when theydrew up to the table that she was not going to be able to eat at all,and he was convinced that she was even more in need of food than he. Butthe wine, thin and acidulous as it was, helped, and he saw to it thatfor a while she had no chance to talk. He told her the story of _TheDumb Princess_ in detail and dwelt a little upon the half formulatedsymbolism of it.

When at last he paused, she said, "I think I know why the princess wasdumb. Because when she tried to speak no one wanted to hear what she hadto say. They insisted on keeping her an image merely, so that they couldgo on attributing to her just the thoughts they wished her to think andjust the desires they wanted her to feel. That's the spell that has mademany a woman dumb upon all the essentials."

He gripped his hands together between his knees, leaned a little forward,drew a steadying breath and said, "There's something I wish you'd do forme just while we're sitting quietly like this. It has been so momentary,this life of ours together,--the times I mean when we've been bodilytogether. The whole of it could be reckoned quite easily in minutes.There has been more packed into them, of course, than into many a lover'smonths and years, but one effect it has had on me has been to make you,when you aren't here physically with me, like this, where by merelyreaching out I can touch you, a little--visionary to me. I confuse youwith the Dumb Princess over there whom you made me create. I getmisgivings that you're just a sort of wraith. Well, if you're going awayand we aren't to be within--touching distance of each other again for along while--perhaps months, I want more of you, that my memory can holdon by. The real every-day person that you are instead, as you say, of theimage I've had to make of you. So I wish you'd tell me as nearly as youcan remember everything that you've done--everything that has happened toyou--to-day."

That last word was like the touch of a spur. She shuddered as she cried,"Not to-day!"

He did not press for a reason and the next moment she went on in hernatural manner again. "That's a strange thing for you to wish. At leastthe strangeness of it strikes me after some of the things that have beenhappening lately. Yet I don't believe it happens often that a lover asksas specifically as that to be--disillusioned. And that is what you wouldbe. Because the complete story of a day,--any day,--with nosuppressions, nothing tucked decently away out of sight, would be apretty searching test."

"That's why I asked for it," he said, "I'd like to be disillusioned; justas completely as possible."

"That's because you're so sure you wouldn't be." The raggedness of hervoice betrayed a strong emotion. With a leap of the pulse he told himselfthat it was as if she were crying out against some unforeseen hope. "Youthink it would merely be that lovely little image of yours--the DumbPrincess, coming to life."

"I'd rather have the reality," he told her, "whatever it is. I think Ican make you see that that must be true. The person I love is you who aresitting there across the table from me. I don't believe that any one inthe world was ever more completely and utterly adored than you are beingadored at this moment. I love the things I know you by. The things I'vecome to recognize as yours. I know some of your qualities that way; yoursensitiveness, your uprightness, your fastidious honesty that makes youhate evasions and substitutes,--everything you mean when you saysentimentality. And I know your resolution that carries you along evenwhen you are afraid,--when your sensitiveness makes you afraid. I admireall those qualities, but it isn't their intrinsic worth that makes melove them. I love them because they're the things I know you by. I can'tbe mistaken about them because I've felt them. Just as I've felt yourhands and your mouth and your hair. Well, then, whatever your days havebeen, one day after another, they have in the end produced you sittingthere as you sit now. Whatever your--ingredients are they're youringredients. The total works out to you. Whereas my illusions work out tonothing better than my little image of the Dumb Princess."

"Would it surprise you," she asked, "to know that I could be cruel? Imean exactly what the word means. Like a little boy who tears the legsoff a beetle. Can you imagine me hurting some one frightfully, whom Ineedn't have hurt at all? Some one who was trying in his own way to bekind to me?"

He smiled. "I can imagine your being cruel to a sentimentalist," he said."Not deliberately, of course. Only after you had been hounded, like alittle white cat, into a corner. By some one who wanted you for an image,merely, that he himself could attribute all the appropriate thoughts anddesires to. I can imagine you turning, at last, and rending him;--limbfrom limb, if you like."

She gazed at him, wide-eyed, for a long moment; then she drooped forwardover the table and cradled her head in her arms. With his hands he triedto comfort her but he felt that they were clumsy and ineffectual.

"I've hurt you horribly," he said, when he could command his voice."Probing in like that."

This must be the unendurable tragedy she had referred to a while ago.She was speaking, voicelessly and he bent down to listen.